Be Now Here

Sunday, March 6, 2011

landscapes are often places where people lose things, lost in the tall grass. People also sometimes dispose of things that are otherwise hard to get rid of in the landscape, like cans of old gasoline. It's pretty common for people to dig a big hole and throw in whatever garbage they have lying around, sometimes burning it before it goes in. Blue corrosion on punctured batteries. Sometimes people bury the evidence of a crime in the garden, like a pistol under the boxwood. When I'm gardening I never know just what my shovel might turn up, but it's always a treat to find a marble, the unbiodegradable marker for obscure games of yesteryear.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Stigweard Productions is proud to present Living Water, a bioactive wildcrafted spring water from the remote mountains of Southern Oregon. Collected by hand from Pumpkin Gulch, a historic water source for miners and travelers. The spring emerges from the ground in a grove of old growth douglas fir, flows through the undergrowth of salal and sword fern, over mossy rocks and under fallen logs. Imbued with the microscropic life energy of a healthy forest and rich in the minerals of bedrock, Living water is a potent elixir. Eight one-gallon green glass jars were filled and carefully packed a mile back to the car. Six gallons are still available.*

*NOTE: this is a totally unfiltered, highly biological product and contains living microorganisms. As such it is not legally or culturally permissible to consume. to life!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Last week while we were vacationing in southern Oregon I read in the local paper that a cougar had been shot over on Whiteschoolhouse Road. There's a herd of miniature horses in the area and apparently this cougar had been culling. A team of trackers from Selma OR were called in and within a few hours they had shot the 6ft long female cougar. Date, August 27th.

Based on the newspaper account I put together a Google Map that shows the route of the cougar through North Berkeley and key points along the 1 hour and 13 minute hunt. Interestingly she makes a large loop through the neighborhood, ending up only 300ft from where the chase began. Returning to a kill? Returning to a den? With young? Not sure, but I hope to stop by the area tomorrow (A memorial has been set up at the corner of Cedar and Shattuck) and retrace the hunt, giving the few blocks around the abandoned Elephant's Pharmacy a quick search.

Friday, May 28, 2010

the standout for me, being landscape inclined, is a project by Atelier 710 that use the grounds of the festival to create a sort of lo-fi ecological/agricultural park using specific landscape-making tactics and recipes.

They outline both the tools and the ideology of their project,(from the project statement here)Atelier’s working principles include traditional landscape architecture means – trees leveling and heading, seeding the territory, gardening, building wood seats and pathways – as well as new experiences and means of landscape creation.“Atelier 710” follows ecological principles and deny integration of alien systems and reject the idea of territory development via destructive urban approaches.

the project is planned for many-years-process where gradually developing functional elements will give birth to new life in old lands.

They want to grow a landscape using non-destructive practices, enriching the ecologic landscape at the same time as they create a new human landscape.

hard to tell just what they did, mowed and put out some cows to graze? always hard in practice, but the direction they're going is where we should be headed: a process-based pro-biotic method of creating functional productive landscapes. no problem!

the basic design pulls warm salty air through a porous cardboard wall that has cold seawater trickling down it. this cools the air in the greenhouse. as the cool air is sucked out the other end of the structure it encounters yet another cardboard membrane, but this one has seawater that has been heated in overhead pipes trickling down it. As the cool greenhouse air meets the warm seawater it gets hot and humid. This heavy air then runs right into a series of pipes that have deep cold seawater in them. As the humid air rapidly cools on these condensers water droplets form and then fall to collect in a subsurface cistern.

Over time a thick skin of evaporated salt crystals forms on, and eventually replaces, the cardboard.

prototypes and pilots

This seems to me like one of the best ideas I've heard about in a while.